President Barack Obama managed to cleave the nation's various demographic constituencies into enough sharply divided slices over the course of the last year to cobble together a majority. Many thought that the cynical strategy would not work, that most Americans were too integrated and not hostile towards one another to fall for such a cheap trick. That point of view turned out to be naïve. One of the president's more effective reelection messaging strategies was the supposed GOP-directed "war on women," which posited that Republican politicians were hopelessly misogynistic and the party's legislative vision included the curtailing of average women's access to contraception (as opposed to simply upholding the taxpayer's right not to subsidize it). While the election may be over, the White House's messaging effort never dies on MSNBC. There, the campaign goes on and the Democratic party's messaging continues.
Host Alex Wagner dug into the GOP's committee chairs on Thursday – the third such segment in less than 24-hours on the liberal cable news network (Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow ran editorial reports on the same subject on Wednesday):
After railing against House Republican's antediluvian attitudes towards the female gender, NOW's panel guests were forced to backtrack.
Bloomberg Businessweek Reporter Joshua Green conceded that Rep. Cathy McMorris Rogers (R-WA) will take over for Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) as the chair of the House Republican Conference – a key committee responsible for forging the party's political talking points and keeping its members on message.
Wagner also conceded that Republican women occupy four of the nation's fifty governor's mansions. She did not mention, however, that the only two women (not one, as Wagner asserted) Democratic governors will retire in January leaving a (gasp) all male Democratic Governors Association.
Nor did Wagner find it worthwhile to mention that the president, supposed paragon of gender and racial equality, has staffed his White House with a virtually all male cast of advisors.
One would think these points would obscure the message that Wagner is trying to convey with all the subtlety of a disoriented deer careening through a plate glass storefront window. Subtlety is not the effort here – merely, the advancement of the Democratic party's agenda.
This is an effort to nakedly and unapologetically tar the Republican party and further drive a wedge between the GOP and single women (as opposed to married women – a group Mitt Romney won by double digits). How else can one characterize this segment when the countervailing evidence that would be presented in any balanced report is intentionally ignored.
That's not news – it is political campaigning.
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